* The latest David Wessel column is a doozy — a useful riff on demographics inspired by a conversation with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, which ends on an optimistic note.

* Ross Douthat has been writing a fascinating series of follow-up posts on same-sex marriage.

* Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School has written a fascinating, honest, and in many respects rather peculiar defense of racial preferences and the “diversity rationale“:

The diversity rationale also facilitates the evasion of prickly subjects — for instance, the fact that racial minorities selected for valued positions sometimes have records that, according to certain criteria such as standardized tests, are inferior to those of white competitors. The diversity rationale moves the spotlight from the perceived deficiencies of racial minorities to their perceived strengths. Unlike other justifications for affirmative action that seek to make exceptions to meritocracy, the diversity rationale is consistent with meritocratic premises. This is the most striking and historically significant aspect of affirmative action: It enables racial-minority status for the first time in American history to be seen as a valuable credential. Instead of the presence of blacks and other racial minorities constituting an expiation of past sins, the diversity rationale makes their presence a welcome and positive good. [Emphasis added.]

The trouble here, of course, is that the diversity rationale seems to operate in a very arbitrary manner, i.e., it’s not clear why we should value color diversity over other kinds of diversity. Compensatory justice strikes me as more compelling than the diversity rationale, though of course it a compensatory logic wouldn’t extend preferences to immigrants and the children of immigrants. Rather, it would focus preferences on the descendants of enslaved African Americans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and members of other groups that at least have a plausible claim to some kind of recompense, rather than the first and second generation Americans of Afro-Caribbean and African descent who disproportionately benefit from preference programs.

I was surprised to see that Kennedy didn’t address this issue.

* Richard Florida has written a terrific piece in The New Republic on how to approach reshaping the U.S. economy, with an emphasis on subtly encouraging the reordering of our metropolitan geography:

In fact, the key to understanding America’s historic ability to respond to great economic crises lies in what economic geographers call the “spatial fix”—the creation of new development patterns, new ways of living and working, and new economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of it. Our rebound after the panic of 1873 and long downturn was forged by the transition from an agricultural nation to an urban-industrial one organized around great cities. Our recovery from the Great Depression saw the rise of massive metropolitan complexes of cities and suburbs, which again intensified and expanded our use of space. Renewed prosperity hinges on the rise of yet another even more massive and more intensive geographic pattern—the mega-region. These new geographic entities are larger than the sum of their parts; they not only produce but consume, spurring further demand.

Unfortunately, Florida ends his piece with a pitch for high-speed rail, an idea that, in my view, is very much in tension with his broader vision of a more flexible, dynamic economy. Density yes, but fixed-rail rather than low-cost leapfrogging technologies?

* Felix Salmon has a post on the housing market and the GSEs, including an assessment of three op-eds on the GSEs that appeared in today’s NYT. Felix and I both like John Carney’s proposal (and we’re both skeptical about Katherine Stone’s proposal):

So let’s embrace Carney’s idea of forcing lenders to retain 5% of whatever they originate, even when they sell their loans to the FHA or Frannie. And let’s try to get these state-owned behmoths out of the mortgage business in a controlled and non-chaotic manner. But let’s not do anything drastic. The last thing we need is another housing crisis, before the current one has even finished playing out.

I was delighted to see Carney in the NYT, hopefully not for the last time.